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S.E.M. Ensemble

The composer Petr Kotik has grappled productively with Gertrude Stein’s chimerical prose for decades, a fascination made manifest in “Master-Pieces,” a seventy-minute chamber opera he completed in 2014. Kotik’s libretto draws from a lecture on the creative process that Stein delivered in 1936, interspersed with fragments from a diary she kept during the Second World War; his music is spare and arresting. Jiří Nekvasil directs the first U.S. staged performance.